Jul 2026· Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval· 0 citations· 67 references
Computer Science
TL;DR
Inspired by Multiple-Trace Theory in cognitive psychology, this work revisit long video understanding from a probe-echo perspective, in which human episodic memories are activated and integrated in parallel, and proposes ProEchoMem, a cognitive-inspired framework that simulates the probe-echo mechanism.
Abstract
Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have shown significant progress in video understanding, but they struggle to scale to long videos due to limited context windows. Existing methods reduce input dimensionality via frame sampling and feature compression, yet discard details and incur high computational cost for post-training. In contrast, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) that indexes long videos for query retrieval and memory-based methods that maintain evolving long-term stores, offer a lighter and deployment-friendly solution. Nevertheless, they rely on shallow retrieval that selects only top-ranked segments and fails to integrate information across multiple relevant video episodes. Inspired by Multiple-Trace Theory in cognitive psychology, we revisit long video understanding from a probe-echo perspective, in which human episodic memories are activated and integrated in parallel. Building on this insight, we propose ProEchoMem, a cognitive-inspired framework that simulates the probe-echo mechanism: (1) Incremental Episodic Memory Construction builds structured knowledge graphs from video streams; (2) Probe-Driven Memory Activation generates probe signals from user queries to activate all stored traces simultaneously; (3) Memory Echo Synthesis integrates activated traces into a coherent and structured memory echo. Experiments on LongerVideos, LVBench, and cross-domain settings demonstrate the effectiveness of ProEchoMem, with multi-trace probing achieving up to 14.2% higher relevance and ablation studies validating the contribution of each module. The code is available at https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/SIGIR26_ProEchoMem
SAM2Dual is proposed, a training-free, plug-and-play inference-time enhancement that improves long-video robustness without updating model weights and Text-Aware Memory is presented, which extracts a compact word-level cue from early frames and uses text embeddings to reweight memory contributions based on semantic compatibility.
Long-video understanding depends not only on the capability of a vision-language model (VLM), but also on how its limited context is constructed from a much longer video. Existing systems typically introduce hand-designed sampling, retrieval, memory, or agentic control strategies, making the context-construction program itself difficult to study as an independent optimization target. We introduce VideoHarness-RSI, a controlled framework that recursively searches executable context constructors around a frozen VLM while keeping the answering model and interface fixed. We study this baseline under complementary weak- and strong-initialization regimes. From a weak uniform constructor, recursive search progressively discovers more structured context-construction programs; from a stronger AKS harness, the same process further advances an already competitive hand-crafted frontier. The resulting harness retains its advantage under a matched cumulative visual-token control and transfers directly to additional long-video benchmarks without further search. Together, these results establish executable context construction as a distinct optimization layer and provide an auditable baseline for studying harness discovery, transfer, and efficiency around frozen VLMs.
This paper introduces TinyMem, a model built upon compact multimodal memory for long-form video action detection that outperforms a range of state-of-the-art models on AVA v2.2 while using 5 times fewer memory tokens than the baseline with dense visual memory embeddings.
Rui Tian, Qi Dai, Hang-Rui Hu et al.· IEEE Transactions on Pattern...· 0 citations
This work forms an episodic multi-key representation that enables precise retrieval of fine-grained memories through a simple key-matching mechanism, and introduces a neighbor filtering mechanism to capture broader semantic context without the massive computational overhead of global memory construction.
Yeeun Choi, Youngbeom Yoo, Joon-Young Lee et al.· 0 citations
StreamFlow is introduced, an efficient visual memory framework that enables dynamic, on-demand access to historical visual information and improves the visual attention score while reducing end-to-end latency and peak memory, enabling more visually grounded and efficient reasoning.
Muxin Fu, Yifan Zhang, Wentao Zhang et al.· 0 citations
Streaming video understanding requires answering questions at arbitrary times over a continuously growing visual stream. The central challenge is to compactly remember long-range history while effectively retrieving question-relevant evidence. We propose Dynamic Hub-and-Spoke Memory (D-HSM), a training-free framework that represents distant history as structured textual memory while preserving the recent frames as visual tokens for fine-grained perception. Specifically, D-HSM turns selected historical video chunks into typed textual observations and stores them in an entity-centered hub-and-spoke memory, with entities as hubs and related evidence as spokes. When answering a question, D-HSM dynamically retrieves a compact question-aware memory subset, expands it through hub-and-spoke links, and combines it with the recent visual window for frozen-VLM answer prediction. Extensive experiments on both streaming and long video benchmarks show that D-HSM consistently and substantially improves VLM backbones and outperforms other state-of-the-art online and offline video understanding baselines.
Xinru Jiang, Lin Zhao, Xi Xiao et al.· 0 citations
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